Thursday, 31 July 2014

The early Zionists barely wanted it. Recent ones gave it up with very little fuss. Nor has Palestinian identity ever focused on it. Two thirds of its inhabitants' families only went there because they had nowhere else to go.

Yet it has become the heart and soul of Palestine, the only territory where Palestinians comprise the entire permanent population (indeed, almost the entire population at any given time), and the home of a very high proportion of all the Palestinians on earth.

Meanwhile, look how important the place now is to the Zionist aspiration.

They have not been affiliated to the Labour Party since the High Blair Period. But both the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, and the Fire Brigades Union, are affiliated to the Labour Representation Committee. That is constitutionally committed to the election of a Labour Government.

I do not know about the FBU, but every April a ritual is performed between Labour and the RMT. The union sends in its affiliation fee, and the Party Treasurer sends back the cheque uncashed. Yet the High Blair Period was a long time ago.

Or was it? Labour is perfectly happy to take Blair's blood-soaked Kazakh money, and prefers it to the small voluntary donations that their trade unions collect from millions of ordinary working people in the United Kingdom.

The RMT is clearly collecting what would be its affiliation dues. Perhaps the FBU is also doing so. Together, they ought to say that they would match any donation that Blair sought to make to Labour, provided that the party rejected his offer in favour of theirs.

That could take some doing. But they might be surprised at how much appeal among the public a public appeal might have.

Wednesday, 30 July 2014

Saturday was the day the State
Department ordered the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Libya. Only three
years ago, Obama helped NATO allies overthrow Moammar Kadafi as part of his
“lead from behind” doctrine, but he has done little to help the resulting
democratic government secure its authority.

Not only did the U.S. not
support sending international peacekeepers[bold mine-DL], it didn’t
mount a serious program to train a new Libyan army.

This is the standard hawkish
critique of the Libyan intervention, which pretends that the flaw in the
administration’s policy was in being too hands-off after the regime had been
toppled.

It conveniently omits the fact that the interim Libyan
government wanted no part of any foreign stabilization force in late 2011 or
early 2012 when it mattered, and ignores that there was no government anywhere
interested in filling a peacekeeping role once the old regime fell.

The intervening governments were never willing to
participate in a significant post-war role, and made that quite clear while the
war was still going on.

Indeed, it was an essential part of the argument that
American interventionists made at the start of the war: there would be no U.S.
ground forces deployed to Libya to fight, nor would there be any deployed to a
post-Gaddafi Libya.

Interventionists don’t get to have the domestic political
advantages of avoiding a prolonged occupation while disavowing the consequences
of the regime change they supported.

Libya is in chaos in large part because outside forces
aided anti-regime rebels in destroying the existing government, and the
governments that intervened are at least partly responsible for what they have
wrought.

It doesn’t follow from this that
the solution for Libya was or is to increase the involvement of outside
governments in misguided efforts to stabilize the country.

Having seen what a “serious program” to train local
forces produced in Iraq, it is far from obvious that a more concerted effort by
the U.S. to train Libyan government forces would have changed much of anything
for the better.

Similarly, the presence of foreign troops in Libya would
more likely have triggered armed resistance against the new government, which
would probably have then turned into another ill-fated attempt at
counterinsurgency to shore up an increasingly unpopular government.

The Libyan war was a serious blunder, but it was not one
that would have been undone by committing more resources and risking more
lives.

Boot’s criticism is mostly just another desperate effort
to try to deny that military intervention and regime change are primarily to
blame for Libya’s current state.

This is akin to the arguments we heard from liberal hawks
when the conditions began to deteriorate rapidly in Iraq: “yes I supported the
invasion, but I don’t agree with how Bush has handled things after that.”

They evaded responsibility for their support for the invasion
by faulting the Bush administration for its poor management of the war, which
presupposed that there was a realistic way to destroy another government
without unleashing the chaos and violence that inevitably followed.

Boot is much the same: he was all for intervening in
Libya, but he doesn’t want the negative consequences of that policy to be
linked to the Republican hawks that backed yet another ill-conceived war.One would have thought that the experience of occupying
Iraq would put an end to the fantasy that a prolonged foreign military presence
in these countries ensured stability and security, but it seems not.

CND has slammed David Cameron’s
‘sinister sidestepping’ of Parliament over a secret, decade-long, nuclear agreementwith the United
States.Theamendment and extension of the Mutual Defence Agreement,
which was first signed in 1958, is fundamental to the replacement of the
Trident nuclear weapons system: allowing for the transfer of information
relating to nuclear technology and US-UK collaboration over their nuclear
weapons programmes.Yet the British
Government has not only denied Parliament the opportunity to discuss it, it
will not even disclose the content of the agreement.Kate
Hudson, CND General Secretary, said:‘Parliament has
not been informed. Whitehall has remained silent. Yet David Cameron’s
Government has just waved through a 10-year extension to a nuclear cooperation
treaty with the United States.‘The Mutual
Defence Agreement flies in the face of the UK’s commitments as a signatory the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).‘The Government
says the MDA is perfectly in keeping with its multilateral disarmament
obligations: but then again they could say anything they want about the
agreement, because they’re keeping the contents secret.‘In no other
area of government would such a sinister sidestepping of democratic process be
tolerated.‘The fact that
we had to be told of our own Government’s actions through President Barack
Obama’s words to Congress marks a dismal day for British democracy. It’s also a
worrying sign of how the Government fights dirty when it comes to challenges to
its talismanic nuclear weapons programme.’Jeremy
Corbyn MP, CND Vice-Chair, said:‘The news that
David Cameron has renewed the Mutual Defence Agreement with the United States
shows he holds Parliament in contempt. The Treaty locks us into US foreign
policy and military adventures and the nuclear weapon technology sharing it
delivers exposes the lie that Trident is an independent weapon.‘I, on behalf of
Parliamentary CND, had requested a debate on the renewal of this treaty before
it went through, yet the Prime Minister has carried it out in secret. No
proposal has been put before the British Parliament. This is a travesty of
democracy.’

There’s something profoundly
weird about our political class. Labour, LibDem and Tory, politicians seem to
move in packs.They feel safe only they use the same ideas and language as the
rest of the Westminster village, even when what they say makes no sense to the
rest of us.

The idea
that competition between corporations is the answer to our society’s problems
is a good example of this kind of bad political groupthink.

The idea began life in the 1980s.A politicians’ commitment to competition showed they were tough and serious,
and didn’t mind cracking a few eggs – and closing a few factories – in the
interests of reversing Britain’s long-term economic decline.

Since then, competition has become the politicians’
answer to everything, from school performance to energy companies
over-charging.As a recent book puts it, ‘elite responses have become an echo
chamber reverberating with one simple message endlessly repeatedregardless of circumstances’.The resurgent hard-right of the
Conservative party pushes faith in competitive forces to the limit.The idea
that performance improves when institutions compete was behind Michael Gove’s
school reforms, David Willetts’ education policy, and the recent, disastrous
reorganisation of the NHS.Our attack is weak because our
politics is framed by the same argument.Our answer to rip-off Britain is
– more competition. Ed Miliband has, bravely, and rightly, argued that we need
to break up the massive concentration of unaccountable power in the banks and
energy firms.But then we seem to lose our bottle, and argue that the answer
comes from more competition. The cap on energy prices will give us time to ‘reset
the market’ so it’s more competitive. The answer to bad banks is more
challengers.Competition is still central to the way we talk about
Britain’s place in the world, too.We insist, as Ed Balls did in an otherwise
very good speech last month, on retaining a ‘competitive’ tax regime.We talk
about Britain being in a ‘global race’, although unlike the Tories we should be‘competing in a race to the top’.By championing competition as the
solution to everything now, we are stuck solving today’s problems with a tool
that’s forty years out of date.With their continued insistence on competition
as the solution, Cameron and Miliband both demonstrate they are Thatcher’s
sons, and haven’t cut the apron strings.Our trouble now is not that
industry is sluggish and inefficient, but that institutions work without being
forced to answer to citizens.The problem isn’t with the market, but with the
business model of firms within it. The answer is to change the way our
institutions are run, not competition.Too often, big business sucks resources out of our towns
and cities, and gives workers and citizens too little negotiating power.Firms
are too centralised, disconnected from the communities they are part of. In
most sectors the search for short-term financial gain has undermined
coordination between different parts of the supply chain. Competition simply
threatens to replace one big, out of touch corporation with another.As Aditya
Chakrabortty asked this week‘what is the point of
having more competitors if they’re all doing the same thing?’Competition is the wrong frame of reference for thinking
about Britain’s place in the world too. Our economy is far less globalised than
people imagine.We spend most of our money on housing, food and transport and
there can be no global market in any of these things.Most workers, even the
richest bankers, are highly immobile.Much of the time, asKevin Doogan argues, the idea of global
competition is just an excuse to drive down wages.Of course, all this is common
sense.Competition is not common in ordinary life. Most of the time, in our
jobs or family life, we get on by working together.Competition has a rare,
special place, on sports days, exams, bidding to buy a house. These kinds of thing
are important, but we divide them off from ordinary life.Very few compete even
on their salaries (bankers are the exception). Most of us think people who
treats every part of their lives as a competition are weird.But it’s amazing
how often politicians ignore things that are obvious.Now is the time for Labour to
reconnect with the way real life works.We need to jettison this rhetoric, tell
a clear story about how a Labour government will stop the corrosive effects of
obsessive competition, and rebuild Britain’s economy and society to creating
institutions where people work together.That means insisting companies are run
through negotiation between workers and managers; giving power over jobs and
training to local communities which can allocate resources to meet common
needs; putting the voice of service users, rather than the notional ability to
choose at the centre of public service reform.The groundwork for all this is being done by Labour’s
policy review, with its emphasis on devolving power to institutions in towns
and cities where people work together for the common good.But the argument
being made in the policy papersJon Cruddasis coordinating needs to be brought
together in a compelling story told by Ed and the rest of the shadow cabinet.That story needs to challenge the Thatcherite consensus in a way we haven’t
seen yet. It must champion the idea and practice of the common good in place of
competitive strife.The argument isn’t the tired old
one about state against market.It’s about creating an economy based on
cooperation not competition, a politics where power is radically decentralised,
a society founded not on transactions and targets but local institutions of
mutual support.

It’s only politicians’ fear of
saying something different which holds them back.But unless Labour makes a
break, and have enough confidence to make its own arguments at last, we are
doomed.

Tuesday, 29 July 2014

Still, in this and in several other countries, the fact that this was an actual war, which tended to focus the mind, made it the beginning in earnest of the encounter between the traditional Left and the traditional Right, each of which found itself excluded from the debate and vilified, and both of which opposed the intervention for nearly or entirely identical reasons.

Those reasons were correct. Even the EU now admits it. We may look forward to that admission about other matters on which we have been agreed. Including the EU.

"As scientists by training, we do not dispute the science of the greenhouse effect - nor did any of our witnesses."

"However, there remain great uncertainties about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation to versus prevention of global warming."

Thus have two members of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee dissented from its report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One is Peter Lilley. The other is Graham Stringer, a Labour MP who has been expressing these views for many years.

Remember, a party's members of Select Committees are now elected by a secret ballot of its MPs. In the privacy of the polling booth, Labour MPs' choice for Energy and Climate Change was Graham Stringer.

It’s a question that has grown in
importance as we see multinational corporations casting their net across the
globe. Who, in reality, makes the rules we live by?Big business is often at the
heart of some lobbying scandal or conspiracy theories about who is at the top
of the chain.But we are currently seeing a real-life attempt by companies to
wield excessive influence over national governments.The transatlantic trade and
investment partnership agreement (also known as TTIP) is being negotiated in
secret between the EU and US.Those in favour of the agreement say it will
bring jobs and growth to both sides of the Atlantic.

But there is a growing body of
people who are concerned about some aspects of the agreement.TTIP will set up secret courts
which will allow multinational corporations to sue governments if they think a
law might harm their profits.This is a feature of many trade agreements, but
when the US and EU states all have robust judicial systems in place, we must
question why such courts are needed.Negotiators insist that these
courts are precautions, that it would not affect governments’ ability to
govern. But we are already seeing these courts in action in other trade
agreements.

hen Australia started looking at
introducing plain packaging of tobacco, cigarette giant Phillip Morris was
already suing the government for billions and seeking to have the legislation
repealed.When Germany began its nuclear
phase-out, Swedish energy company Vattenfall announced that it was suing the
government for 3.7 billion euros.

hen Slovakia moved to restrict
the powers of private insurance firms in the public health system, a number of
insurance companies successfully sued the Slovak government.

These examples strike a chord,
and highlight real concerns.Just two of Labour’s key policies, a reversal of
NHS privatisation and an energy price freeze, could cost the government
billions in a world with TTIP.Even UK companies could set up subsidiaries in
the States to sue their own governments for decisions such as these.This is just one of the concerns
I have about these negotiations, and the reason I have tabled almost fifty
questions to ministers for them to answer over the recess.

Lobbyists have been arguing for
TTIP for years, and a key reason is the power that these secret courts will
give them.We now need the public and
members of EU parliaments to scrutinise this agreement in detail.

So I hope over the summer,
ministers will answer my questions and ease my concerns about secret courts.
And I hope they will answer my call for MPs to see the agreement.Whatever the outcome of these
negotiations, it is important we respect our democracies, and leave governments
free to make the best laws for their citizens.

Monday, 28 July 2014

The New Statesman's article on the rise of Evangelical churches as local voting blocs that Labour needs to mobilise, not news to longstanding readers of this site, is not yet online.

But its account of the remarkable manner in which the unexpected selection of Gavin Shuker as the Labour candidate at Luton South led to the unexpected Labour retention of that seat, both due to the activities of his congregants, ought to attract the attention of Martin Bell.

Although it is now hardly remembered, Bell sought in 2001 to unseat Eric Pickles at Brentwood and Ongar (which latter Bell could not pronounce correctly) due to the "infiltration" of the local Conservative Association by a Pentecostal church.

Pickles had never been a member of the Peniel Pentecostal Church in Pilgrims Hatch. Whereas until his election at the age of 28, Shuker was the pastor of the City Life Church in Luton, and another member of it now chairs his Constituency Labour Party in place of a party machine stalwart who had not wanted him as the candidate.

All to the good, say I. Of course a figure like that (who is white, if it matters, as I expect are most or all of the members of his church) is Labour, and is already a Shadow Minister, for the sake of retaining whom and others variously Evangelical and Catholic on the front bench no whip was imposed on the definition of marriage. Such is their clout within Ed Miliband's Labour Party, however modest their numbers may be.

None of this is remotely surprising to anyone who knows which way the wind blows. It is anything else that would be flabbergasting. Shuker and I have mutual friends, and I strongly suggest that you do not take your eye off him.

But where does it all leave Martin Bell, himself originally from the East of England, where the two Luton seats are Labour's only remaining redoubts in this Parliament, with one of them having been held by these means?

Bell is getting on a bit. But his nephew, who wrote his totally cynical election address at Tatton in 1997, is still only 50 or 51. I refer to Oliver Kamm.

To Kamm's mind, the situation at Luton South, and the influence of figures such as Gavin Shuker within the Labour Party, must be utterly egregious. The idea of the erstwhile pastor of the City Life Church as an International Development Minister must be as horrific to Kamm as it is exciting to me.

Following this week's New Statesman article, if Oliver Kamm does not announce his candidacy at Luton South, then there will be no remaining reason to take with even so much as the slightest seriousness anything that he might ever say on any subject whatever.

The irreconcilable opposition to fracking is mostly motivated by the identities of the strongest proponents.

In the same way does the British (unlike, say, the Australian or the American) Right hate coal. By its own logic, it ought to love coal, as its Australian and American brethren do. But these things are not always about logic.

I still suspect that this shale gas business is all just wishful thinking bordering on superstition, and that the gas is not there, or at least not in anything like the quantities alleged. We all know why anything sounds too good to be true.

The people who are most pro-fracking are so besotted with America that they now even imagine Britain to have the same geological features. But if it is there, then by all means use it.

We need nuclear power, which was strongly supported by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband when David Cameron called it "a last resort".

And we need coal.

Not necessarily in that order.

All else is ancillary to those two.
Including shale gas. If anyone really wants to go about extracting it. And if it is really there.

Yes, the Conservative Party, which has always had a striking aversion to raising funds in the country that it aspires to govern, is heavily dependent on Vladimir Putin's courtiers and their consorts. That is before we even mention the Middle East.

But in order to make up any loss of union funding on account, so to speak, of certain constitutional changes that the unions ought in fact to use to their own considerable advantage, the Labour Party cheerfully takes oodles of lucre from Tony Blair.

"Ah," I hear you cry, "but Blair does not make a penny from his work as a de facto member of the military regime in Egypt." Indeed, he does not. Or, at least, not directly.

But he is handsomely remunerated for his work on behalf of the dictatorships of Central Asia. That is where his money comes from, everyone knows this, and Labour, in that full knowledge, takes that money.

Anything, absolutely anything at all, other than the purely voluntary contributions (anyone who is paying unwittingly cannot read a simple form) of millions of working and thus tax-paying Britons right here in the United Kingdom.

Over the
last year the student movement has seen something of a comeback from the low
ebbs of 2012 and early 2013, with new waves of occupations, landmark campaigns
such asOccupy Sussex, the
inspirational militancy of the3Cosas
cleaners, and a renewed conflict between students and workers’ right
to organise, and the management’s will to stifle dissent.

What is encouraging
about many of these new struggles is that they are organic, creating new
campaigns centered on building student-worker solidarity, such as those of the
SOAS cleaners and King’s College London’s union-run Living Wage Campaign.

Yet
one issue could pass students by altogether, and represents arguably the
greatest single threat to hopes of a free, democratic and public education
system in the UK.

That is of course the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP), a colossal EU-US trade deal, that has been slowly gathering
union and civil society opposition over the last few months.

TTIP
is an attempt to remove ‘non-tariff’ barriers to trade, supposedly to grow the
economies of both the EU and US, yet in reality it poses threats to public
service, workers’ rights and our democracy.

The secret negotiations over TTIP
are believed to include talks on ‘Investor-State Dispute Settlement’ apparatus,
which could see private companies successfully suing democratic governments for
exercising certain policy choices, on the grounds they represent a threat to
profits.

These ISDS mechanisms already exist, and have been used by US
companies to mount legal challenges to governments that try to regulate or take
industries into public ownership.

This alarming use of international
courts to reject any right to oppose privatisation has already taken place.

French transnational Veolia challenged the Egyptian government’s increases in
the minimum wage; tobacco giant Philip Morris challenged Uruguay and Australia
over anti- smoking laws; and Achmea, one of the largest suppliers of financial
services in the Netherlands, challenged the Slovak Republic’s reversal of
health privatisation policy.

The
specific threats to UK healthcare have already been laid out. Len McCluskey,
addressing Unite’s recent policy conference, correctly warned that TTIP would
make NHS privatisation ‘irreversible’,
while Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has pledged that Labour would exempt
the NHS from a TTIP deal.

With the end of negotiations and the finalisation of
the TTIP deal due to take place sometime at the end of 2015, there is hope that
a Labour government could veto what amounts to neoliberalism made permanent in
international law, but current noises from the Opposition bench have remained
quiet.

Certainly the German and French governments have gone further in stating
their desire to see ISDS mechanisms removed altogether, which would be a good
start.

The
threat to education sits around the partial privatisation of Higher Education
carried out by the current coalition.AsUCU have stated:

the education sector is also directly threatened by this
treaty; for-profit education companies have become bigger and more powerful
lobbyists in national and transnational political spheres.

Underhand privatisation of HE has
been going on since 2010.

While students were alarmed at the headline £9,000
fees, markets were created, the block grant to public universities slashed to create
a ‘level playing field’ for private providers, with students not the state
becoming the funder, while private providers operate outside of regulations and
monitoring.

The
entry of private capital into the HE sector is brilliantly documented in Andrew
McGettigan’sThe Great University Gamble,
which explores the creation of internal markets, the changing university
structure to reflect corporate interests rather than public value and the
setting up of overseas campuses to draw in revenue.

McGettigan spells out a
negative future for UK HE, as we head down the road of American universities
such as Phoenix, which is owned by Apollo, who have now acquired BPP university
in the UK (one of six private institutions with ‘Degree Awarding Powers’).

Apollo are also known to have had meetings with David Willetts. Without
rehearsing the calamitous policy of privatised education in the US, it’s
suffice to say it is a model the Tories have been keen to import into the UK,
with scant opposition from Labour.

As Willetts put it himself:

The global
higher education providers that operate in many countries from India to Spain
to the USA need to know that we will be removing the barriers that stop them
operating as universities here as part of our system.

The threat that TTIP poses is to
make all this permanent.

Should a Tory government be re-elected and TTIP go
through unimpeded and as it stands, students and workers in the UK would not be
able to achieve a public education system without undoing what will be the
biggest free trade deal in global history.

Opposition has already come form the
European Students Union and the education committees of the European Trade
Union Confederation.

It’s now well past time for UK students, workers and their
unions to join the campaign to stop this monster free trade deal and the
threats it poses to our struggle.

From Tim Stanley to Owen Jones, the tide is turning against the arms trade. It is time to put the B back into BAE.

This Government hates Britain, ending 800 years of shipbuilding in England, 500 of them at the oldest dry dock in the world, the one at Portsmouth.

Of course no contracts would go to the Clyde, or anywhere else in Scotland, if Scotland became independent. That is a statement of the blatantly obvious. But it ought still to be written into the contracts themselves: that they would be void in that event.

Defence procurement is an integral part of defence. Bring it all in-house, to a BAE restored as the publicly owned monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, accompanied by a total ban on the sale of arms abroad and the use of government action to preserve the skills base while diverting its application to other uses.

Like renationalising the railways, or forcibly splitting retail and investment banking, you will say that I am mad and illiterate until it happens. Then you will pretend to have thought of it yourselves.

That said, the people now running the party that is guaranteed to win the next General Election, the party that has voted against this Government's defence cuts and which has sought to moderate the effects of its persecution of military families, have never accused me of being either mad or illiterate.

Leaving aside that Owen Paterson is an Alan Partridge-like Walter Mitty of whom almost no one in rural England has ever heard and whose departure is being mourned only by the county set, George Monbiot

, for all his faults, writes:

Beware the self-pity of the governing classes.

Ministers
of the crown might look powerful and oppressive to us; often they see
themselves as lonely heroes confronting a sea of troubles.

That has been Tony
Blair’s schtick from the month he took office. We now see him dripping with
other people’s blood but he appears to perceive only the scars on his own back.

I
challenge Mr Paterson to a kind of duel: to walk through the countryside
together, with independent experts, and see who can correctly identify the greatest
number of species across all classes: birds, insects, spiders, plants, fungi
and the rest.

That’s another thing this
putative movement has in common with the US radical right: discredited figures
(think ofOliver NorthandG Gordon Liddy) are feted by powerful
industrial interests and able to develop a new career as commentators.

In other words, Paterson has
positioned himself as a spokesman for a new strand of conservatism that is
likely to consolidate as David Cameron seeks to distance himself, before the
election, from his party’s whackier fringes on the radical right.

In a furious
row with Cameron after he was told he had been sacked, Patersonis reported to have shouted:
“I can out-Ukip Ukip … You are making a big mistake.”

Now, choked with resentment and self-pity, apparently
convinced that despite a life of wealth and power he represents the whipped and
wounded, he has spelt out the essential components of something that might soon
become familiar to us.

Tea Party politics were bound to reach these shores
eventually, and they will be lavishly financed by the very rich.